I’m sure the elevator pitch for this one was something basic like “Bridesmaids meets Spy”—an action comedy starring Rebel Wilson as Sam, a highly effective secret agent who has buried herself so much in her work that she’s ignored her lifelong best friend and soon-to-be-bride Betsy (Anna Camp).
In the hope of reviving their relationship, Sam agrees to be Betsy’s maid of honor and immediately begins to blow off key milestones leading up to the wedding, including her bridal shower, various brunches, and, when we meet them both, her bachelorette party in Paris. Here is where we also meet the other women in the bridal party, including Zoe (Gigi Zumbado), Lydia (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who is trying harder than anyone to inject some life into this corpse of a movie), and future sister-in-law Virginia (Anna Chlumsky), who wants desperately to take over the role of maid of honor.
But duty calls when Sam’s handler, Nadine (Sherry Cola), alerts her that the timeline for a mission in Paris is happening right when the party is kicking off, and Sam vanishes just when Betsy needs her most. As a result, Sam is demoted to bridesmaid at the upcoming lavish wedding, where Sam hopes to salvage and restore the friendship. But even those plans are foiled when a group of armed mercenaries (led by Stephen Dorff’s Kurt) crash the big day looking for hidden loot and a hard drive with vague “valuable information” on it in the mansion belonging to the family of the groom, Ryan (Sam Huntington). Naturally, Sam makes it her sworn duty to save the day, take out the criminals, and actually show up for her best friend when it matters most. And she rains hellfire upon the baddies in one spectacularly generic action scene after another.
A part of me hoped that even though the comedy in this pointless film dies on the vine, the action might liven things up with a little boost from director Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Expendables 2). But even he fails to deliver as we get scene after scene of fairly standard-issue fighting, chasing and shooting, all of which is clearly done with stunt people filling in for our stars, resulting in a lifeless, largely bloodless, but somehow still R-rated, affair.
It doesn’t help that the bridesmaids' characters are all hopelessly cookie-cutter characters, such as the persnickety Virginia, the oversexed Lydia, the pregnant, man-hating Zoe, not to mention the best man, Chris (Justin Hartley), who turns out to be the inside man for the mercenaries. Sam thinks she might be having a love connection with him early on, but she seems to relish the idea of beating the crap out of him for fooling her so completely into thinking he was a good guy.
I wish I could tell you there were certain moments or character pairings that result in a handful of scenes that better Bride Hard, but sadly, no such moments exist. Even the usually energetic Wilson seems trapped in a movie she knows is mediocre at best, and she’s just going through the motions until it’s over. Hell, even the outtakes are truly terrible, and so many times in these lame comedies, the outtakes are all we laugh at.
I don’t usually mention audience reactions to movies I see, but at the Bride Hard screening I attended, where the audience was a crowd of hand-picked, 95-percent younger women (presumably the target audience of this film), no one was laughing at the jokes or getting pumped during the action sequences. From the jump, this one is dead on the slab with no hopes of reviving its stale premise or subpar execution. Welcome to the worst comedy I’ve seen so far in 2025.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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